Unified Files Amicus Addressing Western District's Court Congestion, Refusal To Transfer

On May 24, 2021, Unified filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in support of a mandamus petition related to a denial of transfer. The brief argues that the Western District judge's decision not to transfer a case brought by Koss Corp. ignored authority and the court's analysis amounted to an abuse of discretion by erroneously weighing or failing to credit the parties' representations, including party witness convenience.

Unified Patents is represented by in-house counsel Jonathan Stroud, and by Adam G. Unikowsky, Alexander J. Hadjis, Krystalyn Kinsel and Yusuf Esat of Jenner & Block LLP. Read the amicus brief below:

$3,000 for Gridley IP prior art

On May 27, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $3,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 8,676,668. The patent is owned by by Gridley IP LLC, an IP Edge entity. The '668 patent generally relates to mapping population activity by discerning a location, speed, and direction of wireless mobile devices within a geographic region. It has been asserted against Waitr, Route4Me, WorkWave, Instacart, Doordash, NeighborFavor, Cabconnect, Zum Services, HopSkipDrive, SuperShuttle, and Flywheel Software based on their respective delivery and ridesharing services and apps.

The contest will expire on August 31, 2021. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

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Unified Portal Relevant Prior Art

Q1 2021 Developer Updates

New Portal Product and Features

Patent Law is always bedeviled with quality. Identifying good patents is hard enough, let alone figuring out who is good at making them. Unified decided to take on both by first objectively determining what a good patent prosecution outcome is. It then investigated what law firms had the best outcomes for each art unit. Members can now compare outcomes between law firms to see which ones had the best track record of obtaining good patents in the least time. They can also look at how their prosecution outcomes compare to a competitor.

Unified's Portal now includes an integration with PQAI that uses an open-source platform to retrieve prior-art for a given patent. PQAI uses an AI trained on patent citation data to search for prior-art beyond what was found by the examiner during prosecution. When you request prior-art for a patent, PQAI uses its first claim as the search query. The claim is fed into a deep learning ranking system, which matches the query with all prior patents and ranks them from ‘most similar’ to ‘least similar’. A fixed number of patents from the top of the list is shown to you.

Unified's Portal has improved the name normalization and entity resolution for all patents found in Portal. This includes up-to-date corporate relationships for real-time accuracy of patent ownership.

Copyright © 2021, Unified Patents, LLC. All rights reserved.

Aprese reexamination request granted

On May 13, 2021, three weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified's request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,207,924, owned by Aprese Systems Texas, LLC. The ‘924 patent relates generally to management of applications and/or services based on contextual information. It has been asserted against Toyota.

View district court litigations by Aprese. Unified is represented by Cono Carrano and Ryan Stronczer of Akin Gump and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Michelle Aspen.

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on PAIR, go to https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, enter 90/014,711, and click on the "Image File Wrapper" tab.

Dolby patent challenged in China

On May 19, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidation request for CN1663258 owned by Dolby International AB. CN1663258 has been designated essential to the HEVC Advance pool and SISVEL’s AV1 pool. It is also related to patents that have been designated in those pools.

Unified is represented by JZMC Patent and Trademark Law Office, and the case is managed by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Ashraf Fawzy.